Last month, while waiting at San Francisco International airport for my flight back to India, I was tickled to see a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 which was named Tubular Belle taxi into the next parking bay. It had Richard Branson’s zany sense of humor written all over it. Mike Oldfield’s album Tubular Bells is one of my old-time favorites and, as it happened, I had it in my MP3 player (a new Creative Vision M, I will have you know). Clever name for a 747, I thought to myself. But I did not know the connection between Virgin and Mike Oldfield until this afternoon when I picked up and read Richard Branson’s book Screw it, Let’s Do It: Lessons in Life. (Virgin Books (C) 2006).
Continue reading “Tubular Belle”
Knowledge is Sorrow
Knowledge is sorrow; they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
— George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron
Advantages of Being a Village Idiot
My favorite village idiot joke goes – please stop me if you have heard this one – this way. Once upon a time, in a particular village, when offered a choice between a dime and a nickel, the village idiot would invariably grin and pick up the nickel and everyone would have a hearty laugh at the stupidity of the village idiot.
One day, a kind-hearted guy says to the village idiot, “You know, although a nickel is larger than a dime, it is only worth half a dime. You should pick up the dime.” The idiot says, “I know that. But if I pick up the dime, people would stop offering me the choice between taking a nickel or a dime, wouldn’t they? Who would be that stupid?”
Continue reading “Advantages of Being a Village Idiot”
Interested in Transforming Education? (Part 2)
Thanks to all of you who have written to me in response to my post “Interested in Transforming Education?”
First, it is very gratifying to note the volume of emails I received. I will, time permitting, respond to all of them. For now, I think it would be proper to answer some frequently raised questions. Continue reading “Interested in Transforming Education? (Part 2)”
Interested in Transforming Education?
Want to transform education? Want to re-engineer the whole system of education so that it is effective, efficient, and relevant to the world of today?
I have the business plan and the funding. I need committed smart people who want to accomplish an important task, have fun while doing it, and make a lot of money (exactly in that order.)
Email me for details.
{Go to part 2 of this post.}
Abhorrent Discrimination
A Letter to Dr Manhoman Singh
If there is one thing that makes me see red, it is senseless discrimination in general and unfair treatment of people. But when it comes to discrimination based on a person’s religion, I abhor it with every fiber of my being. It disgusts me and I feel nothing but contempt for people who discriminate based on religion (or lack of religion, in some cases.) One of the distinguishing features of a civilized society is that it does not treat people differently based on their belief systems. Those societies that do discriminate based on belief systems are retrograde, regressive, backward, ignorant, bigoted, intellectually bankrupt, and generally deserve the derogatory label “third world country.”
Continue reading “Abhorrent Discrimination”
RISC and PURA
Recently I got an email from a researcher in Delhi who wrote, “I have been attempting to do an extensive survey of the PURA/Growth Pole concepts. I came across your RISC concept again while searching for related literature. . . What fascinated me the most was that this was the first piece written on such issues in India that is explicitly (and rightly) seeing this as a coordination failure problem, and talking about both infrastructure and accompanying services.”
He then went on to ask in what way RISC differs from PURA. My response, for the record:
Continue reading “RISC and PURA”
Found on the web – 2
Illusions of the senses tell us the truth about perception.
That is a quote from the website 67 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena. To me the site is treasure chest.
Take for instance the Motion Induced Blindness. Pretty amazing. Or how about the Freezing Rotation Illusion?
Channeling Tommy
This blog is a big fan of Thomas Friedman (Friedman has his own category with six posts). So I would like to share a bit from this article by Norman Solomon which attempts to synthesize Friedman’s brain waves [hat tip: Ashok Bardhan]: Continue reading “Channeling Tommy”
Demographic Cognitive Dissonance
People who don’t practise what they preach are not necessarily hypocritical. Perhaps they are merely not sufficiently intelligent to realize that what they do is inconsistent with the logical implications of what they preach. This gap between what they insist to be true while doing something which reveals their words to be false can be attributed to what is politely called cognitive dissonance but more accurately should be termed as stupidity.
Continue reading “Demographic Cognitive Dissonance”
